An application software is used for automating data transactions related to processes of operations, such as business operations, manufacturing operations, communication network operations, and government operations. Typically, processes include one or more transactions which may extract, generate, or update the operations data, that is, data related to the operations. The integrity and consistency of the operations data is very important especially with regard to credibility of records, service provisions, and maintenance of record. Data auditing is a process of tracking changes, such as what data has been changed, who has made the changes to the data, and when are the changes made to the data. Further, the data auditing process also maintains a trail of changes in chronological order so that the operations data can be restored in case of any loss of data or data corruption.
The data auditing is performed on the operations data for various reasons, such as system security, fault investigation, maintenance of history, and compliance to organizational policies or statutory requirements or regulatory requirements. Moreover, the data auditing helps in analyzing pattern of changes in the operations data.
The data auditing is considered as a functional requirement and is specific to an application software, and is therefore integrated with other functional requirements of the application software. For example, a telecom application of an organization has a process named ‘customer relationship’ which includes transactions, such as billing details, customer details, plan details, and usage pattern details. All of these transactions will have different data auditing implementations and the same is usually written at the time of development of the application software, ‘customer relationship’. Subsequent to the deployment of the application software, if the organization needs to audit a new data field that is not covered in the current version of the application software, then the application software has to be modified for incorporating the new audit feature.